Mao Zedong Read online

  But such personal village and family voices tailed off as Mao’s obligations increased. By late 1953, when he celebrated his sixtieth birthday, Mao was not only chairman of the Communist Party, which now had more than five million members, and chairman of the military commission that controlled the armed forces, he was also chairman of the People’s Republic of China itself. In addition to the maze of the ministries in Beijing—there were already thirty-five, and the number was soon to double—the Party had its own organization in every province and rural township, while the military were subdivided into regional zones, each of which had to integrate its operations with the administrative and Party structures. The small Standing Committee of the Politburo, over which Mao presided, thus had to supervise the ultimate integration of all these subunits. With all these demands on Mao’s time, the growing array of private secretaries and bureaucrats around him began to process and sort his letters for him, and those that criticized the government or the Party were often returned—without Mao’s knowledge—to the very local leaders who were being criticized. Furthermore, the end of the Korean War and Stalin’s death in 1953 left Mao in a virtually unchallengeable position within the world Communist pantheon. Mao’s “thought” was specified as being the inspiration for the country’s economic growth and political energies. Yet at the same time Mao himself often felt isolated from events, as expert organizers like Zhou Enlai and Liu Shaoqi coordinated the multifaceted layers of foreign and economic policy.

  In 1953 and 1954 Mao used his personal prestige to purge two of the formerly most powerful Party political bosses, one in Manchuria and one in Shanghai, whom he suspected of being disloyal to his overall revolutionary goals. In 1955, he began to call for sharper levels of radical reorganization in the countryside and for the formation of larger cooperative units, in which more of the land would be worked in common by peasants and the use of private plots and informal markets would be strictly limited. This so-called Little Leap was intended to generate more income for the industrial sector, as well as to tighten the revolutionary fervor of the people. The cooperative idea was paralleled by the mass mobilizations of tens of thousands (sometimes hundreds of thousands) of rural workers to undertake major projects such as reservoir building or digging canals and terracing hillsides. Such projects were customarily hailed in the state-controlled press as proof of the “higher stage” of socialist organization, and if they were not given intensive coverage Mao suspected disloyalty on the part of the editorial staff.

  These huge ventures were either orchestrated by Mao in person or implemented by local Party leaders who sought thus to ingratiate themselves with the “chairman,” as Mao was now generally addressed. But many senior leaders in the Party found these methods ideologically distasteful and economically unsound. They felt that the bulk of rural wealth was generated by the ablest and hardest-working rich peasants, who therefore should be encouraged to increase their holdings and their crop harvests, so that the state could extract the surplus for the industrial sector. In a forceful speech of July 1955, Mao struck back at such theorists: “An upsurge in the new, Socialist mass movement is imminent throughout the countryside. But some of our comrades, tottering along like a woman with bound feet, are complaining all the time, ‘You’re going too fast, much too fast.’ ” Of course there were minor problems, said Mao: sometimes poor peasants were kept out of co-ops despite their poverty; sometimes middle peasants were forced into cooperatives against their interests. Also, though there were around 650,000 cooperatives in China, containing a total of 16,900,000 peasants, they averaged out at only about twenty-six households in each, and tended to be bunched in north China. Unless they could be consolidated in larger units and spread more widely, rapid growth was out of the question. This expanding co-op movement, Mao believed, had two distinct kinds of problems. One was overoptimism, which caused cadres and peasants to be “dizzy with success.” This could be considered a “leftist deviation.” The other was to be “scared of success” and eager to cut back the movement. That was a “rightist deviation,” and was currently the main problem.

  The phrase “dizzy with success” in such an agrarian context was drawn from the works of Stalin, as Mao’s listeners would have known well. It referred to the early stages of Soviet collec tivization, when many officials moved too fast, alienating millions of farmers and causing widespread suffering. Yes, said Mao, there had been “impetuosity and rashness” in the Soviet Union, but “on no account should we allow these comrades to use the Soviet experience as a cover for their idea of moving at a snail’s pace.” In many rural areas in the Soviet Union there had been inadequate preparatory work, and the peasants were not at a high level of political consciousness. China was already rectifying both areas, and Mao intended the full plan to implement “socialist cooperative agriculture” to take eighteen years in all, from the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949 to the end of the Third Five-Year Plan, in 1967-68.

  Mao had already, in fact, decided to move considerably faster than that, but before he did so, he had to woo over foot draggers in the Party, and also be sure of the enthusiastic support of the writers and intellectuals who fueled the Party’s propaganda campaigns and educational work. The situation was complicated by Nikita Khrushchev, First Secretary of the Communist Party of the U.S.S.R., whose totally unexpected denunciation of Stalin in 1956, in a speech that not only denigrated the Soviet Union’s core leader, in Mao’s eyes, but also by implication criticized Mao himself, for his “cult of personality” was by this time well orchestrated and perfectly obvious to any informed outside observers.

  Ever since the Yan‘an days, Mao had been determined to play a leading role as a cultural critic and arbiter. After 1949, Mao often intervened in discussions on film, literature, and philosophy to emphasize the need for vigilance in rooting out negative aspects of the old society, and he supported ordinary people, whom he sardonically referred to as “the nobodies,” whenever they had the courage to attack well-known artistic works in the name of revolutionary purity.

  In late 1956 and early 1957 these various tracks converged in Mao’s mind: the ability of the nobodies of China to transform their society, the obstructionism of the Communist Party’s own new establishment, the possibilities of vast economic strides forward if those with “bound feet” would get out of the way, the need to deepen the channels of criticism and the flow of information and to keep the brightest flames of socialism burning. All of these played a part both in the outpouring of criticism during the middle of 1957, and the launching of the Great Leap Forward in industry and agriculture later that year.

  A long text by Mao gives a sense of his thinking in February 1957. These are the rough notes to an informal four-hour speech that Mao gave in a rather formal setting—that of the Supreme State Conference, attended by leaders of the bureaucracy, the cultural and propaganda spheres, and selected non-Party intellectuals.

  The topic of the speech was “contradictions,” within Chinese society and within the Party, and this evoked the theme that Mao had first broached in his earliest attempts to have himself seen as an expert in Marxist dialectical materialism back in 1937. “Contradictions,” to Mao, were of two kinds, those between “the enemy and ourselves,” which were to be called “antagonistic,” and those “among the people,” which were “non-antagonistic.” The “enemy,” in the Chinese context, would include landlords, “imperialist elements” (presumably those with foreign connections), and the Chinese refugees in Taiwan. Such people were correctly deprived of their civil rights under people’s dictatorship and democratic centralism. This was what constituted Chinese democracy: it was “democracy with leadership,” or “class freedom,” more genuine in China than the bourgeois “facade” of parliamentary freedom in the West. But though the logic of class war would suggest that the Chinese national bourgeoisie would also be the enemy of the Chinese working class, that was not in fact so. “Antagonistic contradictions, if properly handled, can become unantago nistic,”
and that was just what happened in China due to the joint struggle against foreign imperialism. Care was needed in defining enemies and working out when to exercise compassion, or to decide when transformation was completed. “The American moon and the Chinese moon are the same moon,” noted Mao; the American moon was not better. In other words, each society looks up to the sky from its own class vantage point.

  Mao had decided that the process of unity-criticism-unity should be seen as the correct way to resolve contradictions among the people or contradictions within the Communist Party itself. Such a method was better than the “ruthless struggle and merciless blows” approach used by Stalin, for Mao now felt that when Stalin was in power, he often “did things badly.” The Seventh Party Congress of 1945 was an example of the correct process at work. Looking at the Chinese counterrevolutionaries who had been killed—according to Mao, some 700,000 “local bullies and evil gentry” between 1950 and 1952—one saw there were no errors. All of them deserved to die. But when Hong Kong papers claimed twenty million had died they were obviously wide of the mark. “How could we possibly kill twenty million people?” Mao asked.

  Throughout his talk, Mao inserted the kinds of statistics that he had loved to gather in his youth. Though impressionistic, they reveal the sense he had of China’s continuing problems: the dissatisfaction rate of peasants with the co-ops was 2 to 5 percent; households lacking adequate food constituted 10 to 15 percent of the population; 40 percent of children in China had no schools to go to; state grain procurement was around 22 percent of the total produced; 7,000 students in twenty-nine schools demonstrated against the government during 1956; labor unions launched at least fifty strikes, some involving over a thousand workers. In such circumstances, why not “let a hundred flowers bloom, and a hundred schools of thought contend”? That would be an excellent aid to socialist transformation. As for the leaders, being misunderstood in one’s own time was no bad thing, said Mao: it had happened to Jesus and to Confucius, to Sakyamuni Buddha and to Charles Darwin, to Martin Luther and to Galileo.

  This curious speech did indeed encourage intellectuals and critics to speak out with great frankness that summer in the spirit of “a hundred flowers,” just as the seeds Mao had sown in terms of adventurousness in agricultural policy were to germinate later in the year into the Great Leap Forward. Each was followed—as indeed dialectical thinking might have forewarned Mao—by its total negation. The intellectuals who spoke out boldly against abuses in the Party bureaucracy, against pointless constraints on creativity, and even against the relevance of Marxism itself to China’s needs became themselves the victims of a colossal countercritical campaign. Known as the “antirightist campaign” and orchestrated in its details by the newly appointed secretary-general of the Communist Party, Deng Xiaoping, this harsh counteroffensive destroyed hundreds of thousands of lives, leading those found guilty to lose their Party posts and writers’ jobs, and to be sent to remote rural areas or to “reform themselves through labor” in some form of detention center. In many cases they were not rehabilitated until the 1970s or later. The cost to China’s scientific and economic establishment was as high as it was to the creative arts, literature, and education generally. It was often foreign-educated scholars with advanced intellectual skills who had been lulled into speaking out the loudest, and their attempt to truly make a hundred flowers bloom led to their being condemned as “poisonous weeds” for life.

  Though infinitely more complex in its origins than the Hundred Flowers Movement, and unfolding on a far greater scale across the whole of China, the Great Leap Forward ended in catastrophe and famine, a famine that between 1960 and 1961 cost at least 20 million lives. The Great Leap, in Mao’s mind, would combine the imperatives of large-scale cooperative agriculture with a close-to-utopian vision of the ending of distinctions between occupations, sexes, ages, and levels of education. By compressing the hundreds of thousands of existing cooperatives—the number had passed 700,000 by late 1957—into around 20,000 giant communes, with all land owned by the state and worked in common, Mao believed that China as a whole would reap the immense benefits of scale and of flexibility. Communal kitchens and laundries would release women from chores to perform more constructive agricultural tasks; rural laborers would learn to build backyard steel furnaces and supplement China’s iron and steel production in the urban factories; local militia would increase the combat effectiveness of the People’s Liberation Army by allowing them to concentrate on high-priority military matters; communal schools would end the literacy gap; barefoot doctors would bring health care within the reach of every peasant; and collections of people’s poems would swell the national cultural heritage. An organizational ladder, moving up from the individual and family to the work team, the team to the production brigade, and the brigade to the commune and thence to the county and provincial Party secretaries, would speed the flow of orders from the top to the bottom of society and bring the Party’s message effortlessly to all.

  It was in the summer of 1958, at the seaside resort of Beidaihe—where the Communist leaders held an annual summer retreat in the beachside homes built long ago by the foreign imperialists—that Mao’s euphoria reached its pinnacle. The occasion was an enlarged meeting of the Politburo, the inner core of China’s leaders, and Mao’s remarks were scattered in separate speeches spread out over two weeks. In these musings, Mao shared with his senior colleagues a hope for China’s future that had little contact with current reality. Referring to the Great Leap as a continuation of the previous blooming and contending among the Hundred Flowers, Mao professed to see in it the promise of a China without hunger in which the Chinese themselves would no longer pay for food and the surplus would be given away free to the poorer people elsewhere in the world. An extra billion or so added to China’s population would make no difference. Deep plowing, close planting, reforestation, and the economies of scale made possible by enthusiastic massed labor power would produce this surplus, in which a third of China’s land would lie fallow every year. The sprouts of Communism were already present, said Mao. Hard work and discipline would bring better health to everyone, just as Mao had experienced it in the cave dwellings during the civil war, and physicians would have nothing left to do except research. Mental labor would fuse with manual labor, and education would be merged with production. Nobody would need to put on airs—clothes would be indistinguishable in cut and texture, and would be as free as food. Differentiated wage systems would vanish, as would any need for private housing. Morality would improve so much in the new society that no supervision would be required, and all would have the inspired and selfless spirit that had been such a force in the past revolution, when “people died without asking anything in return.” The whole of China would be a lush and landscaped park so that no one would even need to travel anymore to see the sights.

  Whatever the listeners thought, none of them raised voices in protest, and the Great Leap, with all its wild visions, became the policy of the nation in late 1958 and well into 1959. The peasants and workers performed prodigies of labor, working with almost no respite in the fields. Mao suggested the peasants might take off two days in every month to avoid overwork; industrial workers should sleep at their work sites, next to their machines, to save time wasted in commuting. All this was possible, as Mao had said, because the Chinese “people are very disciplined; this has impressed me profoundly. During my visit to Tianjin, tens of thousands of people gathered around me, but at a single wave of my hand everybody dispersed.” Now, almost at a single wave of his hand, they had come together again. The future seemed to be Mao’s for the taking.

  10

  Bleak Harvest

  BOTH THE HUNDRED FLOWERS movement and the launching of the Great Leap show Mao more and more divorced from any true reality check. His scientific speculations, philosophical musings, and economic projections—when unmediated and unpolished by his own private secretaries and the outlying teams of party ideologues—seem in the raw to be extremel
y simple, if not simpleminded. And he himself seemed to care less and less for the consequences that might spring from his own erratic utterances.

  For the strange fact was that Mao had created a world in which things could hardly be otherwise. With the world outside China, Mao had virtually no contact. In his conversations with Stalin in December 1949 and January 1950 there had been some fairly sharp exchanges, and there is no doubt that the Soviet leader had the domestic power and global prestige in the Communist movement to say whatever he liked to Mao. But Stalin died in 1953, and Mao made only one more trip to the Soviet Union, in late 1957. That was a formal occasion, to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, and Mao’s speeches gave nothing away about his true feelings. Mao was not close to Khrushchev, who had angered him by giving the Chinese no warning before his denunciations of Stalin; and though Mao was critical of Stalin, too, in several of his off-the-cuff talks to Chinese cadres, his relations with Khrushchev were never cordial, and the two countries drifted steadily apart until their cultural and political ties were totally severed in 1960.

  Mao saw numerous other foreign leaders in Beijing, but the meetings were generally shrouded in protocol, and visitors were unlikely to point out his shortcomings. Mao had never been to any foreign country except the Soviet Union, and he never visited any other place outside China until he died. As he had said in his 1958 Beidaihe speech, “Why tour the four continents,” when China itself contains so much? Many of Mao’s senior Communist colleagues had lived and studied abroad for considerable periods, and spoke one or more foreign languages. Mao, by the late 1950s, seems to have given up on the study of Russian, though his surviving son, Anqing, and his eldest daughter, Li Min, because of the war years they spent in the Soviet Union, were as at home in Russian as in Chinese. Though he continued to struggle away at English lessons, Mao found them tiring and would use minor illnesses as an excuse to give up on his English reading. When he wanted to read Lenin—as he did with What Is to Be Done, at the time of the antirightist campaign—he specifically asked his secretary to get him a Chinese version, not one in Russian or English.